History's most daring Nazi comparison

As you Brits know from this blog and your other sources, we Americans are forever arguing about Nazi comparisons. Somebody lets rip with a Goebbels analogy, and they get dumped on, and other people act all offended, but the other people typically do the same thing. If you have not seen this amazingly hilarious Jon Stewart clip on the subject, by all means watch.

Well, over the weekend I was watching an episode of The World at War, the marvelous 1970s documentary series narrated by Larry O. Episode 15 to be precise, "The Home Fires," about the domestic situation in England during the war: the industrial production, the quotas and so on.

Attention turned to attempts by the government at press censorship. The press, Olivier intoned, fought these attempts vigorously. They they showed a clip of an apparently famous speech by a young Evening Standard editor by the name of Michael Foot. Speaking out against an attempt to censor the Mirror, Foot said mockingly that the government had assured everyone that if the Mirror relented in this case it would make "no more territorial demands" on British newspapers. He got a huge laugh and repeated it and got maybe a bigger laugh.

No more territorial demands, of course, is what Hitler said after Munich. So Foot was directly comparing Winston Churchill (and Bevin and the whole bunch) to Hitler! During the war! While the actual real-life Nazis were doing their evil Nazi things. Amazing. Yet somehow England survived.

Brits, do you know this speech? I know Foot of course from his Labour years, but this was news to me. The whole episode, which I don't remember seeing when I was young and thought I'd watched the whole series, was just fascinating. Yes, Britons united admirably, but there were strikes and dissent and lots of layers of tension that the show captured well.

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